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Very nice, Judy. I look forward to reading your reviews. I've been looking at it for one and a half year and still haven't taken the plunge yet due to too many expenses with kids and college. Pls post your work!!

I too sat the fence for a long time and hoped and wished so when I had a few extra dollars I decided to treat myself. It is a big expense but hoping it will be as much fun as it looks. I will definitely post my trials to share. I am just trying to decide the best approach. They give a nice cross section of samples to try so that makes it nice.

I got too many Derwent Artists pencils to keep in my pot at my side as I have been adding new colours as and when needed. SO I decided to order even more and exgtend the range. Having bouight one of these boxes for my CD Neopastels I decided to get one for my Derwent Artists which is 120 range but I do have some Signature - the precursor to Artists. So i bought one of these from the SAA for £27 and put them into it - sorted by colours....

This freed up a couple of pots which now one holds various 'tools' to hand and the other holds brushes that previously lived inside a rubber band on the floor by my chair. These boxes are great to work with as the drawers pull out and i can balance on the arm of my chair and on table and handy for finsing colours.

Easier than trying to pul them out of a closed pot esp with the short ones.....

I recently bought abotu 20 more and have another 20 on order. when I added in my tin of 24 I found I had quite a few duplicates which I now have as spares.

Plenty of room for the full 120 range without being difficult to find what I need and holds the old Sigs too Some are old Livery, some new but still same pencils.

Lin, that's a brilliant idea! I have some of those drawer units - a 3 drawer Mont Marte one from Australia, a two drawer Dakota Pastels one and a one drawer Winsor & Newton one that used to have a pastels set in it, guess it was formerly a wood box gift set.

I hadn't thought of using them as pencils trays but that's fantastic - easy to organize by colour, easy to mix brands or types of pencils together to have the full range of colours combined for studio use. Very cool you can just balance the trays on the arm of your chair and get into them easier than fishing into pencil cups for small stubs.

I just noticed that ASW is currently running a buy-one-get-one-free deal on the cardboard Erengi sets. I'm on the fence about it (thinking about twisting a friend's arm to get them to go in on it with me), but it seems like a pretty good deal that you addicts might be interested in: http://www.aswexpress.com/rebates-promotions.html no affiliation, etc.

That's a great sale on good artist grade oil pastels, panicked! Erengi are a workhorse artist grade oil pastel, softer than Cray Pas Specialist, inexpensive, colorful and powerful. I miss my full range set of Erengi. Going to have to get that shipped from Arkansas soon.

If you buy the Buy One Get One Free, you can always put the spare one up in the Swap Shop for half what you paid and bring your costs down. I bet someone would want it for cheap. Definitely get the big box of 50, I used to have that set and it's a nice range.

Or just stash the spare set and work big, there's always that!

A friend of mine thanked me for helping her with some stuff and bought me the 10 Painters set of extra Pan Pastels that I wanted along with a spare 10 color tray to put them in. I have my Pan Pastels Field Set coming! I'm purring and happy about it, because I think the 10 color tray will fit just neatly into my power scooter's wire basket for going outdoors.

I left everything else in the cart that I had in my Blick cart because they were doing a 10% off orders of $125 and I had enough to cover that without the Pans and stuff, just enough for a small order, so I got free shipping and the coupon paid for my California tax. Some of my most-missed supplies and most-needed ones are coming in this order along with the Pans, on or about the 10th.

Claybord Inks. I missed having those for scratchboard. I've got scratchboards and tools but not the inks to do them in color - and they really do work better than any other inks for that, they don't stain the inked surface that hasn't been scratched. The black is an eraser for botched scratchboard works.

A couple of sets of Documount bags for small art 5 x 7" and big art 11 x 14" or smaller. A pint of Clear Colourfix Primer because I didn't bring any of those primers and the Clear was running low anyway because I used it a lot. I missed that way too much. Some masking tape in three different widths, running short on masking tape too. A spare big rubber band for my drawing board. Extra sponges and special paper inserts for my Handy Palette acrylic palette, another item that's still in Arkansas but might be used up by the time I get it. A weirdly inexpensive Niji pencil roll that might be very handy for the assorted pencils kicking around my drawing area.

And to get it to the coupon amount I added a couple of Crescent Rag Mat half size mats, which aren't oversized so I didn't need to buy 10 of them. Two was enough. I was out of white mat board and really wanted some more of the good archival mat board. So that'll also be good for preparing matted art to sell locally.

This is awesome. Needed and missed supplies plus the pure luxury of spare Pans in their own little half size far more convenient little tray. There are times on sick days that I don't want to get up and spread out four big 20 color trays and would really be happier with one little tray always in reach. I'll probably use my Pans more for having the spare set.

And of course there's always plein air! I live in the single most beautiful place I have ever been in my life and the weather gets better every month. I will get out of the house with supplies in hand and paint what I see around me. I wouldn't even have to leave my block to find something paintable. But if I use the Power Scooter, then I can roll the four or five blocks to the nearest park and enjoy that on one of my days off at no additional cost - a good treat for a day toward the end of the month when I'm broke.

Wow! I am always pleasantly surprised by how well Derwent chooses the colors for small sets of their pencils and products. This is no exception. The texture is fun - softer than Coloursoft, firmer than firm Oil pastels, somewhere between very soft colored pencils and firm Oil Pastels. They dissolve easily to rather opaque paint, like solid gouache.

I've charted them and I'll review them on my oil pastels site under Related Media like the oil sticks and watersoluble wax crayons. They're very cool. I'm going to have fun with these!

Its been a while since I have been able to post in this particular thread. However, I do believe that this fantastic Julianne original easel qualifies as an art supply.

also in this order was the umbrella, however it was fairly windy today so I didnt set it up.

I also got the Guerilla Painters French Easel accessory kit with it. I love the paintbrush holder, and well.. the paper towel holder works well but it was windy enough it started blowing my paper towels out in a long string behind me. So i rolled em up, and took the paper towels off the easel.

Gosh had some issues with her easel today in the wind but this one did not move a single bit.

I had previously before it had a nasty disaster this ones little brother. The Blick easel by Julianne.. It in no way is comparable to this one.

Wow! Congratulations, RG! Thanks for letting me know the Blick version of the French Easel by Juillian isn't as good as the Juillian brand name one - these have always fascinated me even though they weigh so much. I guess when it's windy that's a good thing! So self contained. Cool you got the umbrella and paper towel rack and everything too!

Yay, my package came! Here are most of the goodies!

I forgot that they included a 10 color pan pastels tray with the 10 color Painters set on a Blick deal, so I wound up with two 10 color trays! This is very cool if I want to cherry pick a few tints and shades to stack with the 10 Painters set. The small tray is a very handy size and the little stack of 10 pans is so tiny I could keep that on my laptop table all the time.

Which is part of my reason for it - being able to keep it handy all the time when I've got the big set put away. I'm going to be taking the 10 Painters set out when I go to the park to enjoy myself and paint outdoors. Off to the right those cardboard vertical things are 11 x 14" Blick documount bags and 5" x 7" Blick documount bags for packing up finished art. Not shown are the two half size Palm Beach White Crescent RagMat mat boards.

I really like the Niji pencil roll. It's very sturdy. I think I'm going to get more of these, I've got quite a few pencils here that would love to live in rolls and be easier to get at than in their tins!

I also love the black masking tape. Something cool about being able to see it like that. And of course my beloved Clear Colourfix Primer ready again, so I can do pages in my art journals!

Lovely collection! It's clear to me that you prefer various colored pencils and water media. You're nowhere near tragic. Look at it - your entire collection, a lovely one, fit into one photo!

You're practically streamlined. I see no duplications. Mine includes several brands of watercolor pan sets plus two brands of tubes and assorted random other tubes. Every one of those colored pencils serves a different purpose and handles differently. There's no redundancy in your setup.

You might enjoy Pan Pastels next. They handle a lot like paint and you already have good pastel pencils to detail them with.

I'm always window shopping more art supplies even though I have tons. I think it goes with being an artist. I think about what I can do with them - and sometimes when I'm window shopping and run past a mention of something I already bought, the ad gives me ideas on what to do with it so I get it out and try something new.

Jerry's Artarama also has lots of free videos on their site, that's always fun.

I love your tagline. That's too cool.

I took a look at your children's book, Belvedere. Pretty good and it's got charming drawings. Bright, colorful and dramatic.

Lovely collection! It's clear to me that you prefer various colored pencils and water media. You're nowhere near tragic. Look at it - your entire collection, a lovely one, fit into one photo!

You're practically streamlined. I see no duplications. Mine includes several brands of watercolor pan sets plus two brands of tubes and assorted random other tubes. Every one of those colored pencils serves a different purpose and handles differently. There's no redundancy in your setup.

You might enjoy Pan Pastels next. They handle a lot like paint and you already have good pastel pencils to detail them with.

Trust me, if I had my own house and more room, I'd probably have even more art goodies Unfortunately I do have a fair few doubles in my PITT Artist pen colours. I wish I'd just saved for longer and got a 48 box instead of the different smaller sets. At some point I'll probably try selling my Copic markers and the PITT sets so I can trade up to the 48 box. I do prefer coloured pencils and water media, probably because I've been using them the longest and they're what I'm best at (still have a lot to learn though!). I think my favourite pencils are the Derwent Graphitints and Coloursofts, and the Faber-Castell Albrecht-Durer watercolour ones.

I like the W&N paints, though I have a tube of Daler Rowney dark Vandyke brown which my nan gave me, and some tubes of SoHo I got with an order from Jerry's. I don't use the SoHos because they smell quite bad (I don't know if I just got some dodgy tubes or if they're all like that, but it was pretty offputting), and I personally think the W&Ns have stronger colour anyway. The DR tube is good, but since it's very old (I think my nan had it in her box for 20+ years) it takes a bit more water and 'scrubbing' to get it going, and it's a bit squidgy coming out of the tube.

I do want to get into pastels eventually (will probably start out with Rembrandts or some other type of soft pastel, as mentioned in a different thread), but for now I should probably try to work with the mediums I already have I've seen Pan Pastels and they do look like fun, though a bit pricey.

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I took a look at your children's book, Belvedere. Pretty good and it's got charming drawings. Bright, colorful and dramatic.

Thank you I did it as my project for an children's book writing and illustration subject as part of my honours year at uni. I would have loved to have spent more time on it, but other subjects kept eating all my time A lot of the dragon poses were actually based on my dog after I followed him around with a camera for a few days lol